There's a vault with gold somewhere -- but whose vault, and whose gold?

On CNBC today reporter Bob Pisani was shown being put in a van whose windows had been covered, being driven around London for a while, being walked through an unidentified room containing pallets of gold bars, and then being handed a bar whose serial number, ZeroHedge promptly determined (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/some-observations-bob-pisanis-visit-glds-v...), does not appear on the bar list of the inventory claimed by the sponsor of Pisani's mysterious expedition, the exchange-traded fund GLD, which had meant to dispel suspicions about its gold holdings. You can watch the CNBC report here:

For all Pisani or anyone besides his handlers knew, he could have been in the basement of the Bank of England, and the bars he saw could have belonged to the bank itself, to Ireland's Central Bank, or maybe even Venezuela's. Indeed, maybe the Venezuelan ambassador to Britain got the same tour last week, without the blindfolds, in an effort to dissuade his master back in Caracas from repatriating anything and thus making trouble for the fractional-reserve gold banking system and its gold price suppression scheme.

As the custodian for so much foreign-owned gold, the U.S. Federal Reserve may play the same sort of game at the vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. On Mondays the German ambassador may be invited to visit gold he is told is Germany's. On Tuesdays it may be the Italian ambassador's turn. Wednesdays may be reserved for the Swiss ambassador -- yes, even Switzerland, with its mountain fastnesses, is said to keep much of its official gold in New York. (See http://www.gata.org/node/7189.) The Belgian ambassador may visit on Thursdays, as a couple of months ago the Belgian central bank acknowledged that the location of 43 percent of its gold reserves couldn't really be determined, as that much had been lent out. (See http://www.gata.org/node/10031.) Fridays could belong to the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, whose gold, while always being sold or contemplated for sale, has never actually been located either, despite questions posed to the IMF by GATA and clumsily evaded three years ago (http://www.gata.org/node/6242) and a question posed by a member of the U.S. House Committee on Domestic Monetary Policy at a hearing in June (http://www.gata.org/node/10037).

Yes, thanks to today's report on CNBC, it seems that there's gold in a vault somewhere in Britain. But whose vault is it really, and to whom does the gold really belong? How many claims are there against it?

Keeping CNBC's Pisani in the dark, the GLD people didn't answer those questions, but rather made them only more compelling. For keeping him in the dark, at the end of his report Pisani actually thanked them. We do too.

Lewis E. Lehrman, chairman of the Lehrman Institute, sponsor of The Gold Standard Now project, advises that to reduce the $1 1/2 trillion U.S. deficit, the Republican Party must initiate an investment program.

Working Americans are not saving, which enables the banks to lead the country into a cycle of debt, leverage, boom, panic, and bust.

Lehrman says: Eliminating the budget deficit of a trillion and a half dollars cannot be done overnight. The proposal by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan was very dramatic -- one Republican called it radical -- but it was not happily received. The solution, of course, is to design an American program for prosperity, because you can solve these entitlement problems with a growing economy. We need a tremendous program of investment, and investment comes from savings. When you pay savers, middle-income professionals, and working people 0 percent at the bank, you are not going to encourage them to save. Then we are left with a bank cycle of debt, leverage, boom, panic, and bust."

To read more and to sign up for The Gold Standard Now's free, noncommercial, weekly report, "Prosperity through Gold," please visit:

Sona Drills 85.4g Gold/Ton Over 4 Metres at Elizabeth Gold Deposit,
Extending the Mineralization of the Southwest Vein on the Property

Company Press Release, October 27, 2010

VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Sona Resources Corp. reports on five drillling holes in the third round of assay results from the recently completed drill program at its 100 percent-owned Elizabeth Gold Deposit Property in the Lillooet Mining District of southern British Columbia. Highlights from the diamond drilling include:

-- Hole E10-66 intersected 17.4g gold/ton over 1.54 metres.

-- Hole E10-67 intersected 96.4g gold/ton over 2.5 metres, including one assay interval of 383g of gold/ton over 0.5 metres.

Four drill holes, E10-66 to E10-69, targeted the southwestern end of the Southwest Vein, and three of the holes have expanded the mineralized zone in that direction. The Southwest Vein gold mineralization has now been intersected over a strike length of 325 metres, with the deepest hole drilled less than 200 metres from surface.

"The assay results from the Southwest Zone quartz vein continue to be extremely positive," says John P. Thompson, Sona's president and CEO. "We are expanding the Southwest Vein, and this high-grade gold mineralization remains wide open down dip and along strike to the southwest."